Saturday, April 13, 2013

An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire

“The problem for the
British however was that they were ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ into an empire that
had practically stopped expanding and they lay at its very outermost edge.”

You may have noticed I’ve been readinga lot of fiction about Roman Britain/Roman
culture in the 1st-5th centuries.As I’m sure you will have guessed if you have
paid any attention, that was due to my discovery of The Eagle late last year.However, I’ve only managed to read fiction until I decided the time had
come to sift the fiction from the fact (such as it is!).That’s when I embarked on this exacting tome
by David Mattingly, more than a month ago.It was a rather painstaking hike back through the centuries, as the book
required a great deal of concentration, more so than even many of nonfiction
specialist books for my PhD.Archaeology
is obviously not my field, and though the series (Penguin History of Britain)
is meant to be accessible to the average (intelligent and fairly educated)
reader, it was not at all a narrative-driven piece.

“Just the facts, ma’am”—however, facts are surprisingly thin
on the ground given that we can draw fewer reasonable conclusion based on
evidence and supposition than I would have imagined, given how long historians
and archaeologists have been interested in Roman Britain.Mattingly is exceptionally demanding of his
own theses, the major ones (as far as I can pick out) being that he will not
under any circumstances leap to a narrative or form a hypothesis unless there
is enough evidence to justify it.This
is a style very different from the speculation of, say, The Fossil Hunter which reaped pages from the bare bones that exist
about Mary Anning.“There are no large
surviving Roman works specifically dealing with Britain . . . There are, of
course, snippets of historical and geographical information to be gleaned from
a wide range of other source material” (3).Furthermore, it makes me feel both slightly more uneasy and slightly
more relieved about The Eagle’s interpretation
of the Painted People.(Mattingly also
doesn’t like the term Celts as it implies that the people thought of themselves
as one ethnic group or race, whereas “Britons” which he uses is more neutral.)

The other assertion, and one which I think Mattingly defends
consummately, is exploding the familiar and rather pat idea that the Celts got
good things in return for being conquered by the Romans.Frankly, I think the otherwise enjoyable
(though occasionally dogmatic!) Horrible
Histories is guilty of this—their very funny segments, especially The
Historical Wife Swap, seem to underline that all things Roman were “good,”
“pleasant,” and closer to “modern,” whereas I have never seen Horrible Histories show us anything
positive about pre-Roman Britons.Mattingly argues that being conquered and subjugated by the Romans could
not be made any rosier by straight roads—basically, we should think of it in
terms of colonialism (in, for example, the British Empire of the 19th
century).“In our national mythology,
the Roman period is presented as one of development and opportunity far more
than one of defeat, subjugation and exploitation” (4).“Yet, Britons do not appear to have broken
through in numbers to the very highest levels of Roman society.Because of the substantial military garrison,
Britain as a whole probably endured more than its share of oppression” (10).Mattingly drives this point home by noting
that a 1986 play, The Romans in Britain, “caused
a furore because of the staged rape of a male Briton by a group of Roman
soldiers.In part the outcry was to do
with this being a graphic and shocking piece of sex and violence in a theatre,”
but also because the parallels were being drawn with British troops in Northern
Ireland (12).In a chapter titled “The Iron Fist,”
Mattingly describes conquest, which would have affected not only British
combatants but their families (suffering “massacres, rape, random killings,
burning and destruction of settlements, displacements as refugees,
enslavement”) as well as the peculiarly Roman practice of recruiting for the
military right out of the conquered peoples (92).

One of the major difficulties with historical sources is
that they were mostly written by the elite, who of course would have a
pro-conquest point of view.“People who
might be conceived of as pro-Roman from their consumption of Roman goods
(Italian wine, olive oil, metal tableware, medical tools, toilet utensils,
board games) did so primarily as part of a new formulation of power and status
within their own societies” (84).There are
glimpses of other points of view.“Caratacus
is a romantic figure in the story of resistance to Rome, not only for his
military resourcefulness , but also for his consistent refusal to admit defeat”
(103).Queen Cartimandua seems at least
as interesting as Boudicca, if a less polarized figure.Mattingly devotes a fair amount of discussion
to the Boudiccan revolt, thoughtfully pursuing the causes as well as the effects,
and noting that the rebels also targeted Gauls for their participation in “a
systematic effect of Roman colonialism,” those who had “sought to profit from
the conquest phase” (109).Mattingly
thinks at least 7,000 Romans from the army must have been killed in the revolt,
while as many as 10,000 may have died at Colchester.Meanwhile, the probably inflated figure of
80,000 is the number of Britons said to have died by the end of this bloody
conflict.“When Tacitus put the famous
words ‘They make a desolation and they call it peace’ into the mouth of the
Caledonian chieftain Calgacus, he was using a literary device, not reporting
actual speech.However, the sentiment
may have been especially appropriate” (117).

I was astonished to learn (though I’m not sure why I was
astonished) that the Romans tended to win on their campaigns due to a brutal
and highly specialized combination of technological superiority, vicious
reprisals, and the sheer dogged determination of a professional class of
soldiers.“Compared to other ancient
Italian peoples the Roman state was exceptionally aggressive and warlike”
(6).The way the Britons used chariots
in war was a fascinating section as it related to the really impressive battle
section early in The Eagle of the Ninth.“There was thus a distance between
soldiers and civilians in the Roman world—demonstrable by examples in Roman
literature of soldiers being more feared and despised than loved and respected
civilian communities” (167).Moreover, The Silver Branch dealt comprehensively with the “civil wars and
mutinous acts” that characterized the Roman army as “not a machine, but a
living, breathing and sometimes defective community” (124).Six legions were known to have served in
Britain; for much of the period the book covers, Mattingly estimates around
5,500 men.Enjoyable as the notion of
Marcus and Esca “going off grid” in The
Eagle of the Ninth is, Mattingly stresses that among Hadrian’s Wall’s many
uses, it probably did not work as a strict north-south, barbarians-Romanized
divide.I have yet to see the Roman fort
at Caerleon, but I can easily imagine “the huge resources in materials and
manpower invested by Rome in the creation and maintenance of garrison posts”
and the “local impact in terms of takeover of land, felling of timber,
quarrying of gravel, sand and stone, cutting of turf and so on” (161).Rather hilariously (in hindsight), it seems
that Britain as a province was not paying its way in terms of returning the
investment its conquerors had made in subjugating the island—much like the
reason the Stamp Act was introduced to the American colonies in 1765.

Alongside vast amounts of crafted chariot fittings which
showed the wealth of the charioteers, there is a dearth of evidence for how the
Britons disposed of their dead; with some evidence for inhumation and some for
cremation, some for dismemberment, much more for informal burial
practices.The deposition of goods into
running water is a familiar one to any Arthurian scholar (indeed, any viewer of
“Battlefield”) and I was interested to discover there seems to have been a
similar tradition as far away as Colombia. (However, a profusion of severed heads
discovered in the Walbrook tends toward rituals of sacrifice.) Tilla sweating
around in her wool garment in Ruso and
the Root of All Evils highlights that most people wore wool in Britain; the
incongruous Roman villa in King Arthur is
that much more incongruous as “it would be strange indeed to find standard
Mediterranean fashions of clothing” (208).There are in fact very few depictions of what was worn; there are only two known depictions of togas.Mattingly highlights the almost bartering
relationship some Romano-Britons may have had with their gods; “Frumentius, a
soldier of the cohors II Tungrorum at
Birrens, got his money’s worth by dedicating to ‘all the gods and goddesses’”
(216).I love reading about historical
cookery, so it’s worth noting that Romans in Britain ate many different types
of cereals, pork, bacon, ham, lard, goat, roe deer, venison, chickens, geese,
fish, oysters, eggs, butter, beans, radishes, apples, plums, honey, olive oil,
spices, salt, wine and beer.

One of the more interesting places where a little human
interest is allowed to creep in is with epigraphy—writing and inscriptions on
all kinds of media including stone, copper-alloy sheets, etc (furthermore, many
people appear to have carved their names or initials into everyday objects[1]).There are also some surviving wooden
tablets—most of them are palimpsests because the wax that used to be in them,
and upon which a stylus wrote, is of course gone, but there are traces of the
writing from marks on the wood.Much
better are ink tablets from Vindolanda which
seem to have given a treasure trove of data[2].I can imagine they informed R.S. Downie’s
writing, considering that they range from duty rosters to contracts, accounts,
personal letters, and many “relate to the household of one ofthe commanding officers, Flavius Cerialis and
his wife Sulpicia Lepidina” (162).The
correspondence between Sulpicia and Claudia Severa, wife of an auxiliary
commander at Briga offers one of the
rare windows into humanity that exist within the book.“A letter sent by Claudia to Sulpicia
inviting her to attend her birthday party is among the most interesting
tablets.Other letters refer to further
visits and to the loneliness of the women between-times” (183). However, the epigraphic tradition seems to
have been one rarely picked up by the Britons and therefore we have the most
data about communities near garrisons (the absolutely amazing curse tablets
from Bath are one exception[3]).The fact that younger soldiers were more
likely to be commemorated by messmates rather than by wives (or “wives”) also
illuminates that “the sexual needs of the younger soldiers were probably served
by casual contacts (however organized) around military bases” as shown to some
extent in Medicus and the Disappearing
Dancing Girls.Interestingly,
several female names mentioned along with those of “messmates” attests to the
fact that at Vindolanda at least,
there would have been concubines of the soldiers with them in the fort (names
such as Elpis, Verecunda, “sister Thuttena,” Crispa, Ingenua, and Varranilla
suggest German or Gallic origins).Regina,
wife of Barathes the Palmyrene, is an interesting “success” story; it appears
she started out as his slave, and he freed her in order to marry her.“The fact that she was a Catuvellaunian by
birth and had been taken into slavery long after the conquest phase suggests
that she may have been sold into slavery by her own family” (196).Another “success” story is that of a woman
called Melania in the fifth century, who “chose to dispose of her multi-million
property portfolio across Italy, Sicily, Spain, Africa, and Britain”
(455).

Further to the debts Ruso gets into in Medicus, Mattingly notes, “The sums involved were mostly trifling
(a few denarii), but several sums
exceeded a year’s pay and one exceptional debt of 2,000 denarii appears to have involved an officer” (191).Fascinatingly, noting where oil lamps have
been found suggests they were much more popular around military contexts.On the other hand, “small metal toilet
implements” “remained popular personal grooming items throughout the Roman
period, though they became much more rare on the Continent” (473).Clearly tweezers, probes, and nail cleaners
really appealed to the Britons.There is
huge difficulty in investigating British urban sites because of the “success of
many of the locations selected as urban centres. About two thirds of the major towns of the
province lie beneath modern urban conurbations” (263).One of the best exceptions is Silchester,
which of course Sutcliff used for The
Eagle of the Ninth, though Mattingly suggests it may be in fact atypical.Interestingly, old habits die hard:timber construction was, despite fire
hazards, extremely well-developed and may have been a pre-Roman specialization.

I enjoyed the (somewhat romanticized) idea in The Silver Branch of the lights of Roman
Britain extinguishing themselves, though it is interesting that “there thus
appears to have been a small garrison of sorts in Wales down to close to the
end of Roman Britain,” chiming with what I think I was told back in 2008 that
one of the last forts before the “Dark Ages” was Segontium in Wales (245).“One of the few certain later fourth-century
military texts from Britain, dedicating a signal station on the Yorkshire
coast, is barely intelligible as Latin” (248).Despite the rather sad feeling one gets as the Romans “leave” and
literacy “crumbles,” I am very much attracted to the idea that left over
buildings took on new functions and continued to be used sometimes for 80 years
after their original function was abandoned.Evidence suggests that the elite moved out of town centers when their
fresh water supply became unreliable.I
confess I’m interested in the volume that follows this, though perhaps even
more so with what might have gone before.After all, Mattingly says, “the late Iron Age in southern Britain was a
story of dynastic rivalry (with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline perhaps oddly prescient)” (59).

There is still so much we don’t know.I mean, what’s up with Ogam[4]?Personally, despite all the problems with it,
a romantic part of me really likes the tack King
Arthur took in making Arthur a Romano-Briton with his Darmatian knights
(calvary of which cohors?), somehow
passing the flame of civilization (?) or a British identity (?) independent of
those rough and destructive Saxons (naughty, naughty Saxons!)[5].Of course, given that most of the Druids were
slain in brutal reprisals (look at the one on Anglesey) it seems unlikely
Merlin could have been one, but who knows?Furthermore, Guinevere as a Pict (?) / Woad (?) / anachronistic Boudicca
figure (oppressed by Christianity rather than the military) made about as much
historical sense as the “Celts” in Robin
Hood:Prince of Thieves, but heigh
ho.“Vortigern may be an apocryphal
figure, but clearly he represented a type of local tyrannus” (532).If we
had a time machine, would we really want to use it?

[1] “A Roman
helmet from London with no less than four separate names stamped into its neck
guard” (207).

[2] “The
implications are that the large-scale use of such tablets was standard and
wide-ranging in terms of the types of records and communications.. . . a typical Northumberland rain storm
seems to have extinguished a smouldering bonfire and preserved one of the main
groups” (200).

[3] The
curse tablets get their own table covering several pages and are worth
investigating in full.The thefts range
from a silver ring to a bathing tunic to 5 denarii
to 4 cows.“The formulaic nature and
language of the tablts is characteristically Roman . . . the pattern . . .
strongly suggests that this was a British peculiarity” (315).

[4] “Evidently
invented by a native Irish person with a knowledge of Latin” used in
inscriptions in southern Wales, some of which I have seen myself.